We have few traces to denote that Corneille was a scholar. However, of course, he read Latin, and Seneca furnished him with the idea of a tragedy on the subject of Medea. The "Sophonisba" of Mairet was the only regular tragedy that had appeared on the French stage. [Sidenote: 1635. Ætat. 29.] Corneille aspired to classic correctness in this new play; but his piece met with little success. It was a cold imitation of a bad original--the interest was null. Corneille was afterwards aware of its defects, and speaks openly of them when he subsequently printed it. After "Medea" he wrote another comedy, in his old style, called "The Illusion." It is strange that a writer whose merit consists in energy and grandeur should have spent his youth in writing tame and mediocre comedies. At length Corneille broke through the sort of cloud which so long obscured his genius and his glory. And let not the French ever forget that he owed his initiation into true tragic interest to the Spanish drama. Difference of manners, religion, and language renders the heroic subjects, which are so sublime and vehement in their native Greek dress, in modern plays either tame expositions of book learning, or false pictures, in which Frenchmen take ancient names, but express modern sentiments. Spanish poets at once escaped from these trammels: they portrayed men such as they knew them to be; they represented events such as they witnessed; they depicted passions such as they felt warm in their own hearts; and Corneille, by recurring to these writers, at once entered into the spirit of stage effect and interest, and opened to his countrymen a career, which, if they and he had had discernment to follow, might have raised them far higher in the history of modern drama. The incongruities of the Spanish theatre are, it is true, numerous; and, in following their example, much was to be avoided, both in plot and dialogue. Corneille felt this; but, in some degree, he fell into the opposite extreme.